Uncoupling American Empire: Cultural Politics of Deviance and Unequal Difference, 1890-1910

1. Sexual Deviance and Racial Excess

U N C E R TA I N D O M E S T I C I T Y –Part I– 27 The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed, as when, at the Exhibition, she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale. Maisie in truth almost gasped in her own; this was with the fuller perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child more as an animal than as a “real” lady; she might have been a clever frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far too small and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir Claude’s. —Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897) In July 1885, W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in London, published a series of articles titled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which became a landmark in the public debates over child and adolescent sexuality. Describing the findings of Stead’s private investigations into juvenile prostitution in London, these articles challenged the British Parliament to confront the devastating conditions of what is now called “child sexual abuse” by raising the age of consent.1 Stead’s exposé successfully mobilized an enormous public demonstration in Hyde Park to demand the passage of legislation raising the age of consent for girls from age thirteen to sixteen, thereby forcing the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. This act stipulated sixteen as the age of consent: it is a milestone that marks state intervention into the policing of children’s sexuality and the increasing surveillance of working-class girls in the name of protection.2 Exemplifying the period’s heightened preoccupation with the boundaries of childhood and sexual exploitation in England, Stead’s exposé was part of a broader discursive formation that took place from 1870 to 1914.3 During this period, the forces of media publicity, mass campaigning, and statutory –1– Sexual Deviance and Racial Excess 28 U N CO U P L I N G A M E R I C A N E M P I R E legislation were mobilized in an effort to reckon with child prostitution, incest, and the age of consent—pressing concerns that are thematized in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. These issues were related to a host of other “problems” of capitalism and British imperialism that dominated the social landscape of late-Victorian London, including increasing class instability, the exacerbation of poverty, the influx of Jewish and Irish immigrants, the persistent presence of Africans, and the rising number of Asian Indians.4 Moreover, young women’s increasing participation in the labor market also triggered heated debates about over women’s access to public entertainment, women’s property and custody rights, and the crisis of the white middle-class family. London also saw a shift in the boundaries between childhood and adulthood defined in sexual terms as some upper-class members struggled to resist an ethos based on pleasure arising among the middle class, which emerged as early-Victorian sexual codes of reproduction broke down.5 Commenting on the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, historian Judith R. Walkowitz remarks that “the desire to protect young girls thinly masked coercive impulse to control their voluntary sexual responses.”6 An explosion of discourses during this period—from urban exposés of child and adult prostitution; legal debates about child abuse; the denigration of women’s presence in public space; to the racialization of prostitutes, working women, and sexual criminals—all mediated the rapidly changing social boundaries.7 The ramifications of Stead’s exposé and the subsequent legislation crossed the Atlantic and alerted American social reformers, thus generating similar legal and cultural accounts about female sexuality.8 In the United States, the last quarter of the nineteenth century also witnessed drastic changes in single adolescent girls’ relationship to the labor market due to several factors, including the decreasing availability of meaningful work within young women’s own households; their movement out of unpaid domestic employment at home into the paid workforce; and their relocation to the rapidly growing U.S. cities, often with but sometimes without their families. These changes created an exponentially growing visibility of single young women in U.S. urban centers, particularly in places of entertainment , thus...